Senate is playing God

SIR: The recent face-off between Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), Minister of Power, Works and Housing provokes this write – up. He said that the Senate had no right to increase the budget as is being done by the National Assembly since the inception of democracy in Nigeria. We just have to settle this issue once and for all. This reminds me of Gani Fawehinmi, Tai Solarin and Malam Aminu Kano of blessed memories. Our present social critics are bulldogs who cannot bite.

The Senate is playing God as members see themselves as the alpha and omega that cannot be queried or questioned by any citizen. Members go on two or three weeks holiday when the rest of us only go on two days of any public holiday. Recall that the senators abandoned their legislative duties to be in court as a sign of solidarity with the Senate President.

The present Senate is the odd-one out in the whole world where the opposition party is the Deputy Senate President. Even the United States of America which celebrated 244 years of her independence on July 4 has no such history.

The truth is that the present National Assembly is terrible. Just think of it – How can a member of our House of Representative propose that those thieves who stole our money should be pardoned because they invested the stolen money in Nigeria? That shows the level of moral decadence in the nation.

These National Assembly members don’t realize that the world is now a small village and that the rest of the world would judge Nigeria by the level of the morality of those in the National Assembly.

It seems the current senators don’t care what happens to the economy. President Mohammed Buhari presented the year 2017 Budget to the Senate in December 2016. The Senate went on Christmas holiday without touching the budget. When they came back, they started playing politics with the lives of Nigerians. What is their pride? The Budget for 2017 was just signed into law in June.

It is in the life of this present legislative assembly they introduced “padding” into the budget. The question now is: Whose purview is the preparation of the federal government’s budget? We just have to get it clear once and for all, as the senators cannot continue to put their sword of Damocles on the rest of us over their claim of performing an oversight function.

It is not only the executive and the legislature that form the government; the judiciary is also part of the federal government. Since the judiciary never had issues over budget with the executive, the legislative arm too should submit its budget to the executive. If the National Assembly has any addition to make to budget, they should lobby the executive like other arms of government, but not to see themselves as the final authority on the budget. I think the judiciary has to speak out. Do we have to go to court on every issue?